Category: Google Analytics

An End-to-End Approach

Paid search gives advertisers the unique ability to send a large amount of qualified traffic to their web properties with just the flip of a switch. In the world of digital marketing, this is a powerful capability, but the speed with which paid search campaigns can be created can sometimes lead to strategies that overlook the importance of developing a coherent and audience-driven theme into the messaging used in every step of your account’s creation.

That is why it is so important to start every new paid search initiative with a careful consideration of who you will be targeting with your ads, and ultimately, the goals you have in mind for this traffic. By developing a solid understanding of these things, advertisers can begin building end-to-end messaging strategies that seamlessly carry your paid search strategy from your audience to your ads, and finally, through to your targeted landing page.

In this guide, we will walk you through the process of using the end goal of your campaign to reverse engineer your messaging and the audience you will need to leverage in order to support it, along with how you can use this process to develop a more cohesive strategy that maximizes the success you can expect from your paid search initiatives.

Understanding Your Goals

When building a paid search strategy, the first priority should always be to develop a solid understanding of what action you would like to drive on your site and how taking this action can benefit your targeted audience or persona. Are you trying to increase downloads of a gated asset? Perhaps you would like to drive more software demos for your sales team? In any case, take a look at your ultimate goal and put yourself into the shoes of someone who would benefit from taking this action. This will be your targeted persona. Ask yourself how this persona will ultimately benefit from taking this targeted action. Take this process a step further and consider what makes this specific persona unique. Do they have any challenges that your targeted offer helps address? Is there anything that may prevent them from taking action on your site? Using all of this knowledge, you can start to develop how you will target this audience as well as the messaging that you will be using. – Read more

Merchants have many options for accepting online payments. “PayPal Payments Standard” is popular, but it can be challenging for Google Analytics to report the sale.

Using PayPal Payments Standard, customers leave the merchant’s website for their account at PayPal. After they complete payment, customers are redirected by PayPal back to the URL provided by the merchant.

There are two issues that can impact reporting in Google Analytics from this process.

First, the customer may not make it back to the merchant’s order confirmation page to trigger ecommerce reporting in Google Analytics. If the return URL is not set properly, the customer may not go back at all or may go back to the merchant’s home page or some other page. None will trigger the Google Analytics ecommerce code. A correct return URL will send the customer back to the order confirmation page, and the Google Analytics ecommerce code fires upon arrival.

This return URL is typically provided by the ecommerce platform in the payment settings. In PayPal, the return URL settings reside behind the gear icon in the top-right after logging in. – Read more

Arguably the single best free tool available to marketers is Google Analytics. If you know how to use it, it can tell you so much about your customers, how they are using your website, what they’re interested in, and what is causing them issues.

However, no tool is perfect. And no tool can do everything you need it to. Even something as impactful as Google Analytics must come with a few words of warning.

To get the most out of the tool, you have to first understand what it is telling you. And with a tool as powerful as Google Analytics, the biggest fear is in assuming everyone will read the data in the same way.

One Statistic, Multiple Interpretations

Let’s look at an example:

Your team is reviewing the most popular conversion paths on your website and you find that people landing on one specific page are returning to the previous page at a high rate. This is something that Google Analytics can show you quite clearly. You can see the click paths, and so you know where they are coming from and where they are going next.

It’s obvious, in this case, that there is a problem worth correcting. Something about that page is not working. – Read more

If you’re producing digital content for your website or social media, then you want to know whether it’s working or not! Here’s our run down of metrics that you should be keeping an eye on.

Why do you need to know about digital marketing metrics?

Unlike offline marketing such as adverts and flyers, digital marketing offers businesses a plethora of in-depth insights into how effective their marketing efforts really are. With every post, like, share, follow or comment data is created that you can use to extend your reach and increase engagement with your brand.

Whether you’re looking to grow your business through organic or paid digital marketing there are a number of key metrics that you really need to know. In this post we’ll be looking at metrics that you can access for free, either via your social channels or via Google Analytics, and because they’re free, there’s no excuse not to be using them!

Website and behaviour

This section looks at how people are behaving on your website. All the information that you need can be found in Google Analytics, if you don’t already have an account set up, make your way over there now and get it done.

Page views

The total number of views a single page has had for any given time period. It’s a pretty basic stat but useful all the same as you can measure/ compare how your pages rank against each other.

If you find a page that stands out as particularly high ranking, or indeed low ranking, it can be an indicator to have a look at what might be working well, or not so well.

A marketer relies on AdWords conversion tracking to optimize the performance.

Trying to make the best possible decision for AdWords conversions the majority of the people stuck their heads arguing about low performing keywords with the clients. At the end the decision based on conversion data that is inside Google Analytics. For making it easier, some people switched to AdWords conversion in Google Analytics.

When a conversion triggered from AdWords, it might take up to 24 hours to show it up in Google Analytics. However, if some import goals in google conversion it can take up to 24-72 hours. This first step is to point out all the errors; the next is to eliminate those errors by using error-killing tools for google analytics mistakes.

The AdWords conversion in google analytics might take a day or two to show up properly in google analytics.This can be a bit difficult if you might have more than transactions. The best way to setup, an Ad word is to link a google analytics goal to Ad Word as a conversion. Then the next step is to confirm that if tracking is working properly for Google Analytics or not.

For having a check on it, a person visited your website from an Ad came back in 30 days period, this conversion recorded in AdWords on the day when a person first clicked on the link. Moreover, it depends on how you set goals in analytics you might be able to see it on an actualday. – Read more

Getting better results from your website starts with collecting the right data and understanding how to extract insights from it. Before you can improve performance, you need to know what users are getting up to on your website and measure how this aligns with your marketing objectives. Event tracking is one of the more advanced Google Analytics features that allows you to track specific user actions on your website – down to the very elements they’re clicking on. With these data insights, you can measure how effectively key parts of your page are performing and diagnose issues with more precision.

Here’s what you need to know about event tracking in Google Analytics.

What is event tracking in Google Analytics?

Event tracking is a Google Analytics tool that can be used to measure user actions on your website. More specifically, it allows you to track every time a user clicks on a specific element; a link, a buy button, the play button on your video, etc. Or, you can also use event tracking to measure how far a user scrolls down the page, to understand how they’re engaging with your content.

This means you can track just about every action people are taking on your website, measure performance against highly-specific metrics and KPIs (e.g. video views, PDF downloads, etc) and test new variations against the data that matters most.

Essentially, event tracking takes off the blindfold and allows you to see what users are really doing on your site. – Read more

Starting on Jan 8, 2019 you will be able to target and generate reports for a new device category via the AdWords API – connected TV.

The connected TV platform, (or “TV screens,” as it’s referred to in the new Google Ads experience), is a new Platform type similar to desktop, tablet, and mobile. It targets devices such as smart TVs, gaming consoles and standalone connected devices including Chromecast, Roku, and AppleTV.

Since connected TV shares the same functionality as the three existing platforms, you can target or exclude it using bid modifiers for Display/Video ad campaigns; the new criterion will have a platformName of “ConnectedTv” and an ID of 30004. You can also isolate it in reports using a Device segment named CONNECTED_TV. Note that even though bidding will only be supported for Display and Video ads, some residual traffic may appear in other kinds of reports so you should still pull the new segment for non Display/Video ad reports. – Read more

Google Analytics periodically rolls out new tracking code. To date, the updates have supported:

Improved data collection methods, such as asynchronous tracking, which was included in a 2009 update. The “ga.js” tag could be placed at the top of all pages. It improved not only tracking but also load speed.

Enhanced data collection, such as Universal Analytics, which was rolled out in 2013. The “analytics.js” tag supported cross-device tracking, advanced segments, and custom dimensions and metrics.

Multiple products in Google Marketing Platform, such as the Global Site Tag — “gtag.js” — which represents the most recent tag. Global Site Tag was launched in 2017.

The updates present a challenge to ensure the latest tags are installed. They also present an opportunity: getting robust data and reports that help drive your business. – read more

Creating a New Goal

Once you’ve signed into Google Analytics, click Admin, then choose the view you want. From there, look at the View column, and click Goals.

To create a new goal, click +NEW GOAL. You can also choose to import a goal from the gallery, or to click on an existing target to edit it. If the +NEW GOAL or Import options are not visible, it’s because you’ve already created the maximum 20 goals for the current view.

You have three options for creating goals:

Use a template.

Create a custom goal.

Create a smart goal.

To determine if your business is on the right track for growth, it’s important to set goals – but perhaps what’s even more important is making sure you have systems in place that will help you track your progress toward achieving those goals. Thanks to Google Analytics, it’s relatively easy to set and follow goal progress directly from within your dashboard.

To create, edit, and share goals in Google Analytics, you must have Edit permission at the View level in the account you’re working with. If you do not, speak to the administrator of your account to have those enabled.

Using a Template to Create a New Goal

Choose a Template from the list, and click Next to complete the Goal setup. Templates are included within Google Analytics on an industry basis. If your account does not have an industry category selected, you won’t see this option. Once you choose your industry, you can see a list of available templates to use for goal creation.

Creating a Custom Goal

Choose Custom from the list of options, click Next Step, then select the Type of Goal, and click Next to continue setting up your goal.